Even the slow days, those that seemed less eventful perhaps because I was indexing many hours, still had their virtues. Indexing was an autonomous act. I chose to do it; it had not been thrust upon me. Decision making power tasted of ripened fruit, apricots rather than mangoes, but only because I chose to eat apricots.
Slow days had been absent this visit; every day had been full. Few moments spread out toward an endless horizon of thoughtless waste. My quiet moments watched the rain; I savored those moments. Rain-watching created a mixture of relaxation and serenity. I saved reflection for ceiling gazing and contemplation for pacing. Indexing never bored, either. The complexity of thought required intense concentration and focus. Sitting for hours building intersecting webs of thought while keeping the growing structure balanced exercised my abilities for constructing coherent complexes of thought. Indexing thought formations needed cohesiveness and flexibility to accommodate the constant march of new information.
Once I had become proficient as an indexer, I saw patterns emerging earlier and earlier in every book. The subtlest of contextual clues shouted at me, “This is what’s coming; the concepts are going to build and then circle back around to close the loop of this idea while introducing the next round of concepts.” Even the more complex critiques for graduate studies began reading like familiar articles in the “life and leisure” sections of newspapers. The same concepts and buzz words rose up again and again, differing only from discipline to discipline: Gender studies, international relations, political philosophy, economics, psychology, geography, marketing, information management, law, physics, and more across the spectrum of academic studies. Each academic discipline attempted to define how things were and how they could or should be.
Language is language, its use intended to satisfy an agenda in a particular way for specific audiences. Research for graduate studies in international relations was written in a radically different style than an introductory sociology textbook written for undergraduates; biographies and trade books also differed in style and structure. After thirteen years of indexing, these differing “audience genres” fit into easily identifiable structures and patterns, similar concepts, familiar paradigms. I wondered if new thoughts ever emerged in certain fields; in others, the rapidity of research development and new discoveries amazed me.
The two disciplines I indexed most often? Early childhood development and educational theory. Out of all the academic disciplines I indexed, I noticed more radical changes in thought and theory in these fields. Discoveries about healthy development and learning (lifelong) obliterated many of the ideas and practices that had been prevalent during my K-12 education. I learned about how I had been fucked up by the educational system by indexing these books over the years—though shrooms were proving that life-altering discoveries could be made at the speed of light.
I learned indexing then I learned by indexing. Deadlines transformed the learning into work, though. I couldn’t always take the time I wanted to build a work of art and transform my thought in the process. The books about education and development were the most fascinating. The subjects were rich, the discoveries mind-blowing. More and more and more, play was being recognized not just as essential to health but to learning—not just for children, either. The seriousness of the world, from sitting behind desks as children to sitting in cubicles or offices behind computers as adults, had crippled human development and learning. The old relied on repetitive movements and thoughts while the new of learning and development theories advocated diverse and creative thoughts and movements. Views on emotions, too, had changed. In the past, showing or expressing emotions had been considered detrimental in education or work (except for certain types of education and work). The new research, though, insisted that emotional involvement in learning and work benefited the individual and resulted in higher quality learning and increased productivity.
So many workplaces either deadened emotions or created frazzled stress. It was as true for outdoor jobs as indoor jobs. Across the board? No. Just for the majority of jobs, the majority of workers—not persons who worked but workers. Soul-crushing, no-fun, stress-inducing, hellish work … with little job security.
The schools had been as bad. Sitting in desks in rows or circles, assignments that bored more than enlivened, practicing math equations and formulas endlessly for reasons that would never become clear unless one pursued a degree in mathematics or computer science, writing essays about subjects that had little connection to reality—yet—for most K-12 students, and trying to figure out why knowing the difference between meiosis and mitosis mattered? The subjects were not the problem so much as the methods and the settings. The educational research suggested that authentic learning, the type of learning that would become part of a person’s way of thinking, feeling, and acting, was possible only if the observation, study, and practice within any field felt personally meaningful and allowed interpersonal connections that eliminated (or at least diminished) separation and alienation.
That meant entirely reconfiguring the education system. Not just the governmental institutions and the schools, not just the administrators and teachers, but the methods and settings. Diversity, variety, endless possibilities for awe and wonder. To optimize personal health and learning potential in the United States, education would require an annual investment equal to that of the U.S. Department of Defense. As book after book indicated, though, political priorities dictated whether research would be effectively implemented. I indexed a number of educational policy books and knew well the problems facing the education system in the United States. The Department of Defense presented the biggest obstacle.
On the other hand, the case studies from countries like The Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and others were surprising and inspiring. Play-centered education had become a reality in many communities in northern Europe. School settings were being designed based on the latest and most reliable research as well. Then again, those countries spent a much larger percentage of their annual government budgets on education; half their annual budgets weren’t wasted on military spending.
The new book I had begun indexing in the morning was an undergraduate textbook on early childhood education. I spent most of the day working on it. I worked at a fast pace because little was new to me. Every idea unfolded in front of me like an old friend. “Hello, Montessori. Good to see you again. Yes, I know what you have to say. I’m mapping the concepts as we speak. Take care and say hello to the kids for me. Toodles. Oh, Mr. Vygotsky and Mr. Piaget, fancy meeting the two of you here. That only happens in every undergraduate education textbook that has a few chapters devoted to the history of education. I see you’re both telling the same old yarns as you always do. Good to know your ideas haven’t changed since you died.”
Indexing the same material over and over again was never tedious, though, because I could fly through the text due to familiarity. I made five times more money on undergraduate textbooks compared to graduate-level texts because of this. I loved the mix: the undergrad textbooks and trade books allowed me to make good money and the texts for graduate students challenged my mind and allowed me to learn far more complex ideas. Taken together, I had been paid well for a thirteen-year liberal arts education. Why would I pay tuition when universities were willing to pay me to learn?
The knowledge I gleaned helped me build a better understanding of the world and my meager place within it. But what I truly valued were the thinking processes I learned and used while indexing. From contextual thinking to analytical thought, I honed my skills. The knowledge gained through content operated as variables for use in puzzle solving—not problem solving but puzzle solving. I could go into any grocery store, walk up and down each aisle as well as the checkout counter, and tell anyone how international relations, economics, political philosophy, marketing, advertising, cultural studies, biology, mining practices, manufacturing, distribution, labor relations, management practices, financial markets, chemistry, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, agriculture, environmental studies, immigration, construction principles, interior design, architecture, psychology, history, and much, much more fit together to result in every square centimeter of surface space.
I increasingly applied my contextual thinking skills in real-world situations, making associations between seemingly unrelated objects, persons, institutions, processes, places, and times. The information was physically evident, known variables in the global puzzle of civilization and natural history. I didn’t need to go to China to see the manufacturing of a bottle of shampoo; that was a variable evident in an aisle of a grocery store. I knew the whole damn process from the political and economic conditions that allowed the mining of materials that were shipped to refineries then delivered to factories to be manufactured into computer chips, Barbie dolls, or plastic shampoo bottles by technology (made in much the same way at different factories after having been mined and refined through similar processes) and workers (who were all but owned by management in many of the countries of manufacture) then sold through contracts to multinational corporations such as General Mills, Nestle, or Samsung--each of the corporations with relations to various governments and other corporations throughout the world--that shipped, through other corporations, the products to various destinations for regional and local storage, distribution, and sale.
On and on it went. The story of a single can of Campbell’s soup would require hundreds of books. The cheap metal shelving that the soup cans sat on at the grocery store? Hundreds of books as well, much of the same information telling different parts of the stories about each product, each object. There wasn’t a need to know every detail, though. The gaps could be filled through context if a person could see the patterns using a limited number of known variables. Contextual thinking was its own type of mathematics for me. Variables were required, but the more complex and comprehensive my internal thought web (“formula”) the fewer variables required to put together the puzzle. Understanding how intelligence agencies and militaries operated was as important in understanding a grocery store’s creation as the local company that installed the dry wall—more important, to be truthful.
Learning all of this came not simply through indexing. I was curious about how the world worked, how civilization, in particular, developed and functioned. I read, studied, and explored other writings, observed institutional and cultural processes in the real world, and discussed with others nuances of thought, design, process, and function. The spark of my curiosity had been ignited by moving from Iowa to Arizona when I was ten years old. A John Deere factory laid off thousands of workers in Waterloo, Iowa, in the early 1980s. My father had a floor installation business and a city that had a population of 100,000 in 1980 had only 66,000 by 1990. The layoffs had a ripple effect debilitating myriad businesses that had a co-dependent relationship with the corporation, either directly or indirectly. The real estate market collapsed, companies providing home improvement products and services (such as my father’s) took a hit, and so on. The tax base dwindled and schools closed as a third of the community fled for jobs elsewhere because a mammoth international corporation eviscerated jobs. The company had been profitable when it laid off the union workers, but it wanted even greater profits—like an impetuous toddler shouting “Mine!” after claiming all but one toy in the room—even though its actions resulted in an entire community being ripped apart.
As a child and teenager, I was sickened as I learned more details about this heinous act. My introduction to the reality that human interests were meaningless in relation to corporate interests devastated me. Why so few understood that this was the beginning of a dangerous trend baffled me. I was merely a teenager and yet I could see more clearly than most of the adults around me. The same thing that happened to Waterloo was happening across the country: communities being decimated by corporate shakeups and mass migrations of peoples from state to state. When anyone decried the decline in values in America I said, “Well, yeah, the communities where everyone grew up and knew everyone for generations were destroyed so the relationships that forged and maintained those values no longer exist. This makes it easier for corporations to pick off masses of individuals regrouped in different environments who don’t know each other, trust one another, or share similar interests. Who is going to put their jobs or lives on the line for co-workers or others in the community after experiencing the precariousness of their own financial viability? Their neighbors and co-workers are essentially foreigners to them, perhaps even another species.” Explanations like that fell on deaf ears or somehow were interpreted as anti-Americanism or communism. I couldn't fathom how others thought, but they came across as morons incapable of understanding simple differences between rocks and plants. Indeed, a different species.
A seminal moment in childhood directed the focus of my attention throughout life. I wasn’t exclusively looking for answers, trying to build a framework to understand how such insane practices failed to elicit even a modicum of outrage from nearly everyone I knew or met. That happened organically, over time, a variable here and there would pop up and I would snatch it, examine it, try to place it here, no there, ah, right there, and then I would step back and see how this design was shaping up. Over time it became evident that the spiraling process of learning created an ever-expanding sphere. Variables appeared as orbiting objects being sucked in by the gravity of my thought. I began seeing the unknown variables just as clearly as the known variables. The design was proving to be well-constructed after more than two decades of thought. There had been fits and starts, mistakes made, but the design eventually managed itself without much need for conscious direction. The thought processes knew how to incorporate new information into the whole. The design was a mind of its own, a mind within my mind.
All of these thoughts came as I indexed the early childhood education book throughout the morning and afternoon. On this slow, simple day, I watched my mind at work. My thoughts while indexing such a familiar book were allowed to roam wild—another benefit to indexing a familiar subject matter. I could work while thinking about all manner of ideas while also playing within my imagination. I liked being able to do that. I wondered if anyone thought like that, if others had several thought processes operating concurrently, mixing together to make a more complex design before separating into entirely new modes of thought. Did others have internal thought-strings twirling round and round making beautiful designs even as each string remained intact as a distinguishable entity? Did they watch those strings of thought unwind while sitting back as an observer, a spectator, fascinated by the show the mind was performing? Probably another reason I had forgotten about my body more often than not; my mind was fascinated by itself. “Wow, this is what I am? Oh, and that, too? You’ve got to be kidding me? I’m thinking that right now as well? Ha! Oh my god, they have nothing to do with one another! Oh, oh, oh, wait, yes, I see, they do. Holy shit, that was awesome. Incredible how they all tied together into a cohesive, heartwarming design. It’s so beautiful … so beautiful.”
It wasn’t unusual for me to cry with joy while seeing inner visions of thought. Perhaps mystics experienced the same thing. I didn’t know. I simply thought, “This is what happens when I allow myself to observe my thought.” I felt ecstasy during the experiences, but I didn’t think they were supernatural or anything like that. They happened to me in the natural flow of thought and feeling, another way of experiencing life, as natural and commonplace as anger and comparative thinking.
I continued allowing my thoughts to roam while devouring experimental learning theory. I thought about how and why I had tuned out current events over the previous years. I knew the patterns. I didn’t need to know specifics. I recognized corporate “journalism” as the charade it was. There was plenty to learn from the way events were covered as long as I identified the distortions resulting from persuasive or narrative writing or telling within specific contexts while recognizing that these were attempts, however fumbling, to pass as objective analysis or a report presenting facts.
I accurately predicted the following four years during the morning of the 9/11 attacks. As I watched the towers falling again and again before noon that day, I knew the Bush administration was going to use the attack as an excuse to limit civil liberties, allow greater institutional invasions of privacy, ramp up defense and intelligence spending, and figure out a way to attack Iraq. I had read the neoconservative doctrine created by Rumsfeld, Rice, Cheney, Wolfowitz, and others in the 1990s, an agenda prompted by what they conceived as the failings of the Persian Gulf War. I knew their domestic and foreign policy interests and that they formed the core of Bush’s cabinet. I knew oil, telecommunications, and infrastructure companies had the most to gain from increased defense spending and war, I knew private contractors would be used to complement law enforcement, the military, and the intelligence agencies, I knew connections between 9/11 and Iraq would be made whether they were true or not. The Bush administration had been looking for any possible excuse to get troops on the ground in the Middle East to rebuild infrastructure and create a pathway for corporate control of the country and region. They also would attempt to manipulate the media and thus the public to gain political license to implement nearly every legislative and policy initiative they laid out as part of their vision for the future. Iraq would be an easy sell because the vilification of Saddam by the government through the media had been continuous for over a decade. No matter who had flown the planes into the Twin Towers, Saddam was going to be blamed in some way.
It was maddening to watch it all unfold over the following years and I was disgusted by the majority of Americans who were so easily manipulated. Their minds were pudding, gooey brain juice that had lost all power to put facts together in any coherent way. They didn’t understand their emotions, they didn’t recognize motivations for specific actions, and they couldn’t tell that they were being maneuvered like pawns in a game of political chess. Absent the ability to think for themselves, they allowed “news” sensationalists to tell them what to think and how to feel; they gorged themselves on anything that gave their emotions a satisfying jolt, any target to direct their futile fear and anger. The public wanted someone to blame, a scapegoat, didn’t matter who just as long as the target was presented as evil incarnate. There was too much fear and hate for ambiguity or subtlety. Truth didn’t matter. Even the best of minds didn’t seem to be able to recognize the orchestration of a new American identity crafted by masterful media storytellers such as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and others. Noam Chomsky, Robert Fisk, and a few other true thinkers and journalists who had been following foreign affairs and domestic matters for decades identified what was occurring, but their perspectives rarely saw the light of day in the U.S. media. When they were mentioned they were demonized by talking heads as well as so-called panel discussions made up almost entirely of militarized zealots.
Contextual thinking made life better and worse for me. Worse because I could see what was happening without any power to change it; better because it gave me a rush to be able to see what so few others were capable or willing to see. I felt a sense of intense awe for having created a mind capable of developing a web of innumerable links detailing how each phase of the political process unfolded; while I detested what was occurring I was also deeply impressed by the Bush administration’s understanding of how to manipulate and control the narrative they needed to justify heinous actions. Genius is genius and I appreciated watching a relatively small group of men and women convincingly present a history that didn’t match reality at all, doing it all in the light of day, right under the noses of a public as narrow-minded and pudding-brained as proletariat and middle-classed Germans of the 1930s.
Even the worst aspects of humanity were magnificent in the sense that they fit within the design I had created. I was being proven correct by the events that unfolded, confirming that my living framework of the relational functioning of the world was powerful in predictive capacity and extraordinarily well-designed. I could touch any link and watch the coils squirm, the sphere jiggle, and I would have an answer to any question I might ask. I could make the ball bounce just by connecting an international occurrence to a cultural studies theory or I could make the globe pulse by surrounding the way a mother talked to her child in public with a multitude of early childhood development and learning theories. I simultaneously felt sorrow and euphoria observing the orb in action.
Over time, I learned to become less emotionally invested in outcomes so that I could appreciate the process. Even violence became beautiful. Violence in and of itself was not beautiful; however, within the context of the spiraling of the puzzle coming together, violence provided evidence that the design was accurate and useful. I lived in a world that had sold itself out, a single person in a planet of seven billion, but being able to see the process and design filled me with awe. It was no less spectacular, for me, than it might have been discovering that the world was not flat or that the Earth rotated around the sun. I wasn’t always in that state of awareness and observation, though. If I could have stopped the violence I would have. Other than my own fascination with being able to see the past, present, and future all at once, I’d had nowhere to go with this ability.
As the afternoon became early evening and I tired of indexing, I realized I had been applying these abilities in a different way the prior three months. Instead of using the powers to figure out the world, I was using them to discover me. For some reason, it took the shrooms to make this monumental shift. Maybe not entirely; deciding to come to Amsterdam was the catalyst and shrooms had nothing to do with that. Since the rest of the world didn’t care about the gifts I was capable of giving I finally made the wise choice to give them to myself. I started off building the design to change the world, but as Foucault had figured out long ago, persons did not change the course of events in the world; discourses of knowledge-creation and dissemination did. In the contemporary world, that meant institutionally-sanctioned and distributed messages, whether in academics, politics, economics, governance, social mores and norms, or any other environment of society. Why it took as long as it did to figure this out, I wasn’t sure. But now that I had, I focused on my own development and the relationships I could make personally on an everyday basis. In other words, live my life.
I was more than halfway through the book I was indexing and I needed a break. I was way ahead of schedule. Prentice Hall could wait. I was pretty much out of Super Lemon so I ground Northern Lights No. 5 into the bat from my dugout and took a hit. I stretched for about fifteen minutes then made pasta and opened the bottle of wine. After I ate I poured another glass and had a cigarette, thinking of nothing as I watched the street outside. The slow day continued to unfold. I ground more ganja into the bat and burned another hit. My body and mind relaxed as I listened to a smooth jazz station. Around eight I put on my hat, coat, and shoes, grabbed my wallet and keys, and walked to Greenhouse. Felt good to be outside even with the cold sprinkling of rain.
I bought four grams of Arjan’s Ultra Haze #2 and spent heavily on a gram of Bubble Mania hash—65 Euros. I went outside and sat on a bench, breaking off a small chunk of the hash to put into my dugout. I took a hit and used the lighter to watch the reflection of the orange glow. I sucked and sucked and sucked. I could barely feel any smoke entering my lungs, but when I stopped and finally exhaled a huge cloud poured out. I felt instantly alert, euphoric, and gratified. The extraordinarily high THC content was evident; few of the other byproducts from buds were present, the type that create the stony effects from smoking pot. The divinity of good hash. Well worth the cost.
I walked back to the apartment debating whether to shroom. When I walked inside, took off my coat, hat, and shoes, I decided against it. The work and thought of the day had tired me. I wanted to enjoy the effects of the hash, stretch, listen to music, and continue reading Kafka on the Shore. A day off from shrooming sounded good. The day had been slow and easy, uneventful except for thought. Tomorrow would be today soon enough.
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